Rust By Example

A crate is a compilation unit in Rust. Whenever rustc some_file.rs is called,
some_file.rs is treated as the crate file. If some_file.rs has mod
declarations in it, then the contents of the module files would be inserted in
places where mod declarations in the crate file are found, before running
the compiler over it. In other words, modules do not get compiled
individually, only crates get compiled.

A crate can be compiled into a binary or into a library. By default, rustc
will produce a binary from a crate. This behavior can be overridden by passing
the --crate-type flag to rustc.